Andrew McLaughlin

Andrew McLaughlin is a technology law and policy nerd. He is Executive Director of Civic Commons, a new non-profit that help cities and other governments share and implement low-cost technologies to improve public services, management, accountability, transparency, and citizen engagement. He is also a director of Code for America.

From 2009-2011, Andrew McLaughlin served on President Obama's White House staff as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States, focusing on Internet, technology, and innovation policy, including open government, cybersecurity, online privacy and free speech, federal R&D priorities, spectrum policy, entrepreneurship, and building open technology platforms for health care, energy efficiency, and education. Prior to the White House, he served on the Obama/Biden presidential transition team, as a member of the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform cluster. From 2004-2009, Andrew was Director of Global Public Policy at Google.

From 1999-2002, Andrew helped launch and manage ICANN, the Internet's technical coordinating organization, serving as Vice President, Chief Policy Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. From 1998-2005, Andrew was a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In 2002-2003, Andrew taught a course on digital democracy at Harvard Law School while working on Internet and telecom law reform projects in a number of developing countries, including Ghana, Mongolia, Kenya, Afghanistan, and South Africa. He was a co-founder of CIPESA, a technology policy think-tank and advocacy center based at Makerere University in Uganda. At Google, Andrew co-led Google's Africa strategy, and served as a member of the Board of Directors of Bridges.org, an international non-profit organization based in Cape Town.

Andrew holds a B.A. from Yale University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. After clerking on the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Andrew started his legal career at Jenner & Block in Washington DC, where he focused on appellate and constitutional litigation. He was a member of the legal team that challenged the U.S. government's first Internet censorship law, resulting in the Supreme Court's landmark 1997 Internet free speech ruling in ACLU vs. Reno. From 1997-98, Andrew served as counsel to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. In 2000, Time Magazine named Andrew one of its Digital Dozen. In 2001, he was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. He is a fellow of the Young Leaders Forum of the National Committee on US-China Relations.

Now that I've joined the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, it's time I started stretching my blogging muscles here. It's thrilling and humbling to be part of this remarkable community of scholars, activists, and students, and I want to make a good impression on all of you.

Though it has been evident for years that Mark Zuckerberg really, really wants Facebook to operate in China, I’m genuinely surprised that the company appears, finally, to have made the decision to do it.

We are inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, researchers, and business leaders working in the technology sector. We are proud that American innovation is the envy of the world, a source of widely-shared prosperity, and a hallmark of our global leadership.

"But Andrew McLaughlin, the cofounder of Higher Ground Labs, a company that invests in technology to help progressive candidates, believes that platforms should suppress propaganda in ad space. “Despite their best intentions, tech companies have built systems that are so open to manipulation by bots and trolls and other techniques that they effectively reward propaganda,” he says.

"Andrew McLaughlin, former deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration, said the vulnerabilities were a concern.

"What we ended up with was a military-grade, encrypted phone that had the microphone ripped out," Mr McLaughlin said, adding that he thinks the White House communications office has prevailed upon Mr Trump to use some kind of phone with enhanced security.

He suggested one with strong encryption, disabled location services and one that talks with a military network instead of commercial cell services.

"But standing up to a president also carries risks, especially for publicly traded companies, which face a legal obligation to put profit ahead of protest. “For companies that are acting in their self-interest, the process is sitting down and looking at this matrix, and trying to figure out how to be effective,” says Andrew McLaughlin, a venture partner at Betaworks and deputy chief technology officer of the United States under President Obama."

From local issues like the BART protests to national and international movements like Occupy and the Arab Spring, individuals and organizations are increasingly utilizing the Internet, social networking, and mobile devices to communicate and connect. This diverse panel from academia, public interest, and private practice, will discuss the opportunities and challenges for free speech as it increasingly moves from the town square to the networked world. Co-sponsored by the California State Bar Cyberspace Committee and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Evgeny Morozov and Andrew McLaughlin will debate the sincerity, utility and repercussions of America's commitment to a free Internet. They will discuss the desireability of network neutrality and network regulation in the context of US foreign policy, the ways to balance user privacy with the growing needs of law enforcement agencies; and the emerging threats to freedom of expression that are inherent in the technical design as well as the business imperatives of today's Web.

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People don't always like what they see when they Google themselves. Sometimes they have posted things they later regret — like unflattering or compromising photos or comments. And it can be maddening when third parties have published personal or inaccurate material about you online.

In Europe, residents can ask corporations like Google to delete those unflattering posts, photos and other online material from online search results. And under the right circumstances, those entities must comply.

On the publication of her new book Now I Know Who My Comrades Are, journalist Emily Parker joins Andrew McLaughlin and Center on U.S.-China Relations Director Orville Schell examine how the Internet and social media are creating a new kind of citizenry in China.

Evgeny Morozov and Andrew McLaughlin debated the sincerity, utility and repercussions of America's commitment to a free Internet. They discussed the desirability of network neutrality and network regulation in the context of US foreign policy, the ways to balance user privacy with the growing needs of law enforcement agencies; and the emerging threats to freedom of expression that are inherent in the technical design as well as the business imperatives of today's Web.